I’ve spent the last couple of weeks rebuilding my favorite drum sounds from ST and DN with TV subtracks. My focus was on using velocity layers to either recreate performance macros or have a wide variety of sounds with just one subtrack quickly accessible and playable via the 16 trigs by using velocity trig mode/the velocity encoder/a MIDI controller or keyboard mapped to velocity.
I thought I might share my process in case anyone is interested. This might not be news to a lot of you, if that’s the case, feel free to add use cases or approaches or just ignore this thread.
Step 1: Recording samples
When making music with ST or DN, I make heavy use of performance macros and then map these to a Faderfox. For example, I assign two sliders that change timbre and envelope to snares and hats respectively. I also like to assign random LFOs with very small amounts to timbre parameters, so that each hit sounds a bit different without you really noticing it that much.
To capture these dynamics in samples, I recorded 48 hits of a drum sound. I moved the sliders up in increments and then recorded three hits of that status. So I have 16 one shots recorded with 3 slight variations of each.
I also have previously built a library of one shots without variations that I would like to assign to velocity layers for e.g. claps or rims.
Step 2: Preparing the samples
These 48 hits were still just one .wav file, so I needed to split them into 48 files. I used ReCycle by Reason for this, which is a free tool that’s very good at this task.
I recommend recording at 120 BPM and exporting a file that is exactly 48 bars long (or however many bars you want to record/export). That will make it easier for ReCycle to recognize slices.
Step 3: Building a TV drumkit .eldrum file
I’ve used Eldrum Creator to prepare the kits for TV. It’s a free tool.
All I really had to do was to create 16 velocity layers for each of the eight tracks of a subtrack. And then drag and drop the .wav files into these.
If you want to be able to play the velocity layers with the trigs, you have the threshold as follows:
1: 7
2: 15
3: 23
4: 31
5: 39
6: 47
7: 55
8: 63
9: 71
10: 79
11: 87
12: 95
13: 103
14: 111
15: 119
16: 127
TV also gives you the option to play round robin samples. This means that you can load several sample files into one velocity layer and then decide whether TV will pick one of these randomly each time you press the trig or play them in order. You can define this in eldrum creator and load several samples into a layer. In my case, I chose to use three files with slight variations per layer (see step 1), which works fine with short one shots even if you do this on eight tracks of a sub track with 16 velocity layers each.
Of course, instead of loading 16 versions of the same drum sound into the layers, you can also load totally different samples. Or use more/less layers. Just note that 16 is the max you can okay with trigs, since there’s only 16 trigs.
Once you’re done, you can export the eldrum file. All you have to do now is to create a folder on TV in the user folder that has the same name as the eldrum file and contains all of the .wav files you’ve defined in eldrum creator. You will then be able to choose the drum kit when entering the machine type “subtrack” menu. Just wait a bit after loading a project until it shows up. It might also have some glitches first but that will stop after a few minutes from my experience so far.
Step 4: performing/playing with the kit
Once you’ve loaded the drum kit to a TV track, you can now use the different velocity options to perform and play with the kit.
I’ve already mentioned that you can set trig mode to velocity and then manually play or live record the layers with the trigs. You could also plock velocities manually, according to the velocity thresholds defined in the eldrum file (see above).
You can also use the velocity encoder on the trig page to perform with the different samples while the track is playing. You can even use a MIDI controller and map CC4 to do this (that’s a bit buggy and you need to do it a few times and jump between tracks until it works).
Just make sure to clear any velocity locks on trigs to make these things work. You’ll find that function in the “transform” menu, I think it’s called “unlock”. You’ll also find other options there, like assigning random velocities to trigs or ramping it up or down. Definitely also cool things to try out and make use of the velocity layers.
Of course, you can always play with the layers by using a keyboard or pads that are velocity sensitive.
My two cents
I’ve just finished building a few of these kits and could only try out if everything works as I’ve planned, so I can’t say how good all of this will work for me making music. But I’m pretty sure it was worth the work, because it’s the secret superpower of TV and super tracks. You can store so many samples just within one track, and you can build samples you can perform with. It brings together the best of DT slices and “one track for whole drum kits” functions available on OP-XY or Ableton Move. I’m optimistic this will finally bring samples to a “close enough” level for me when it comes to replicating an actual drum synth. It’s still quite limited, of course, but the benefit of having it all in one machine and define the exact behavior I want to perform makes up for that.
I hope this is helpful for some people!